Thanks for starting this discussion, Steve, I appreciate the care you've put into laying out the options.
On Tue, Apr 19, 2022 at 01:27:46AM +0100, Steve McIntyre wrote: > 3. We could stop pretending that the non-free images are unofficial, and > maybe move them alongside the normal free images so they're published > together. This would make them easier to find for people that need > them, but is likely to cause users to question why we still make any > images without firmware if they're otherwise identical. > 4. The images team technically could simply include non-free into the > official > images, and add firmware packages to the input lists for those images. > However, that would still leave us with problem 3 from above (non-free > generally enabled on most installations). > 5. We could split out the non-free firmware packages into a new > non-free-firmware component in the archive, and allow a specific exception > only to allow inclusion of those packages on our official media. We would > then generate only one set of official media, including those non-free > firmware packages. > (We've already seen various suggestions in recent years to split up the > non-free component of the archive like this, for example into > non-free-firmware, non-free-doc, non-free-drivers, etc. Disagreement > (bike-shedding?) about the split caused us to not make any progress on > this. I believe this project should be picked up and completed. We don't > have to make a perfect solution here immediately, just something that > works > well enough for our needs today. We can always tweak and improve the setup > incrementally if that's needed.) I am personally comfortable with your preferred option 5, for all the described reasons (does not reduce user net freedom vs. status quo ante when the firmware was both non-free and non-updatable, etc etc etc). However, and I know that I'm suggesting work for other people here: one thing that has surprised me over the years this question has been open is that no one who has strong feelings about this issue has taken it upon themselves to refactor the images so that the non-free firmware is distributed as an add-on image that could be discovered by the installer at runtime. This would preserve the ability to have entirely-free media under Debian's definition thereof, while also giving users a clearer path to installing any necessary firmware without having to re-download a separate image. And sometimes having 2 separate USB sticks for an install is an inconvenience, so perhaps someone wants to be particularly clever and give the installer an appropriately-sized empty partition in the partition table that the firmware bits could be blatted into. -- Steve Langasek Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS Debian Developer to set it on, and I can move the world. Ubuntu Developer https://www.debian.org/ slanga...@ubuntu.com vor...@debian.org
signature.asc
Description: PGP signature
